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Chelsea Living, a senior citizens’s assisted-living facility, has been approved to replace the vacant former Shrewsbury Manor nursing home at Shrewsbury Avenue and Patterson Avenue, below. (Rendering by Meyer Design; photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

A dowdy stretch of Shrewsbury roadway is in the midst of a makeover.

An old bunker-like warehouse building is gone from the northeast corner of Shrewsbury Avenue and Patterson Avenue, replaced by two new retail businesses. And at the the southeast corner, the overgrown former site of a nursing home is about to get a new assisted-living residence for seniors.

A Sherwin Williams Paints store and an Advance Auto Parts store recently replaced the bunker-like warehouse, below, at the intersection’s northeast corner. (Photos by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)

The demolition last year of the warehouse, which long housed a musicians’ rehearsal studio, “tore out a real blight on the community,” Mayor Donald Burden told redbankgreen this week. “I don’t know how it ever got built,” he said, noting that it had almost no setback from the sidewalk.

The building has been replaced by a Sherwin Williams paint store and an Advance Auto Parts store with ample parking and “an attractive setback,” Burden said.

While such businesses might not be every town’s cup of tea, they’re welcome in Shrewsbury, which has no downtown but lots of highway frontage that it leverages to pay for municipal services.

But it’s not all strip malls and car dealerships. Under a plan conceived by Capital Senior Housing, a Washington, D.C.-based developer, an 85-unit assisted-living facility will be built the southeast corner. That’s the site of the former Shrewsbury Manor, a nursing home that operated there for 65 years until it was closed because of extensive rain damage in 2011.

Unlike the business that preceded it, the new project is for semi-independent individuals who do not need a nursing home, a planner testified during the zoning board hearing for the application in March.

Capital Senior Housing, whose website says is partly funded by the Carlyle Group, has acquired or built some 60 assisted-living facilities around the United States, including two others also known as Chelsea Senior Living in Monmouth County: one in in Tinton Falls, and another in Manalapan.

Architect Dan King of Meyer Design tells redbankgreen that construction on the project is expected to start in late October, with an anticipated opening in December, 2017.

The two corners “kind of complement” roadway improvements the town completed last year on Patterson Avenue, said Burden.

Meantime, a short distance south of the Chelsea Living site, a developer hopes to win approval for a QuickChek filling station and convenience store in front of a building owned by Verizon. A special meeting of the zoning board is scheduled to hear the proposal on August 29 at borough hall.